“Tall?”
I snickered and grinned. “No, ding-a-ling. Your skin color. Where do you think he gets his blue eyes from?” I moved over a little more. “When my brother died, Louie’s mom lost her shit. She wasn’t eating, drinking, or sleeping. I had to take the boys because it was obvious she didn’t know she was the one alive and my brother was the one who wasn’t.”
When I sighed, the arm he had over the back of the couch was lowered to rest against my shoulders, his hand going to palm my upper arm.
“She wasn’t dealing with it. We should have—we should have done something about it. We all knew she wasn’t doing well, but…” Oh man, the guilt hit me hard in the solar plexus. “She fell down the stairs, which I think about now and I’m pretty sure she did it on purpose to have an excuse to take painkillers… and six weeks after my brother died, she overdosed.”
There was something stuck in my throat, and for the second time in minutes, I felt my eyes tear up. “I’ll never forgive myself for not saying or doing something. Getting her help. I don’t know. Something. You know, I expected somebody else to do something or maybe thought she would eventually just get it together, but that’s not the way it works.”
“You couldn’t have known,” he said softly.
I shrugged under his arm. “I don’t know. Maybe not. But now Lou’s stuck with me forever. He doesn’t ever want to talk about her or acknowledge she even existed. You saw how he gets when we bring her up. That night in his room was the first time he’d said anything about her in forever. Even Josh, every once in a while, says something about her, but Lou refuses to. The only person he ever wants to talk about is his dad.”
“She’s the lady in the pictures around the house?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s better than nothing.”
I shrugged again and the arm over me tightened, pulling me in closer to him.
“It didn’t click until now that the Larsens aren’t Josh’s real grandparents.”
“Yeah. Only Louie is biologically related. But they met Josh when he was three. They love him so much. I know Mandy, that’s Louie’s mom, loved him, too. She was great with him. I think that’s why they’re so helpful. I like to think she would have wanted them to stick around in his life, and they have.”
“He’s an easy kid to love,” he said. “If I didn’t know he was your brother’s, I’d think he was yours. You two are exactly alike.”
I scoffed. “We are not.”
“You are. Trip and I have talked about it.”
“You talk about me behind my back?”
“All the time.” He smiled. “You two are… savage. You’re honest, and you’re loyal and love the shit out of things. Both of you give everything to what you care about. I love it.”
I pulled my head back and smiled at him. “That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.”
“When you were about to kick Christy’s ass—”
“I was not going to kick her ass.”
“That’s when I knew, this girl has lost her fucking mind. For a week afterward, all I could think about was how you weren’t going to let anybody—even me—do the wrong thing for Josh, like you’d fight to the death for him. It made me think I’d want someone to feel that way about me.”
This knot formed in my throat, and I couldn’t help but lean forward to kiss his neck as his hand slid up my calf from my foot and settled on the sensitive skin behind my knee. “I threw Hawaiian Punch at your brother, that’s a start.”
Dallas bit his lips and smiled, kissing my cheek once and jawline another.
I tipped my head back to let him trail his mouth down to my neck, his lips warm and soft as they pressed closed and then opened, his breath damp on my skin. “I would never let anyone talk about you.”
“I know, baby. I know,” he said, kissing the hollow part on the right side of my throat. “I heard what you told your client that day at the salon.”
“You did?” I asked, staying where I was with my head back as he leaned over to kiss the other side of my neck, making me squirm.
“Mm-hmm,” he answered. “If you wouldn’t have been at work, I would have kissed the hell out of you.”
I moaned in my throat when his mouth latched on to my earlobe and gave it a suck. Shivers spread throughout my upper body, my nipples hardening. “You can make up for it now if you insist,” I told him in a whisper.
“I’m going to,” he said, sounding husky and raw right before he dipped his face lower and kissed me over and over again between my jaw and collarbone.
Shifting on to a hip, his hands roamed as my head stayed where it was, lulled backward to give him all the room he wanted. Those big palms went from my lower back to tangling his fingers in my loose hair, cupping my skull gently. I tried to keep myself from making noises, settling only for low pants as that wonderful mouth opened from time to time for his tongue to swipe at the skin over one tendon or another. He moved me, maneuvered me however he wanted, to get to whatever spot he wanted.
When his lips went low to kiss from the hollow at my throat, down, down, down a straight line to where the V-shape of my dress ended, I arched my back. I was turned-on. More turned-on than I’d been in my entire life. It was like drowning in pudding. I didn’t want it to end, ever.
And when his low voice spoke right into my ear as his nose drew a line over the shell of it, I was pretty much in a trance. “We don’t have to do anything tonight.”
“You don’t want to?”
His chuckle had me pressing myself closer to him. “What did you tell me about stupid questions?”
Somehow I managed to smile.
“Can I take you to your room?” he asked, pressing his lips just below the corner of my mouth.
He could take me to Mars for all I cared, but I couldn’t speak. All I could do was nod as I swayed into him, needing his mouth on my throat again. His husky laugh hit the sensitive damp skin he’d just had his mouth on. His hand went to my hip, curling those long fingers over my side.
“Yes?” he asked, drawing his mouth back up to kiss my cheeks, my nose, the sliver of skin just above my upper lip, everywhere but my mouth.
I was panting. Panting. “Uh-huh” was all I could get out.
Slowly, without breaking our closeness, he pulled me up to my feet, his mouth still everywhere, his hands going everywhere else—up and down my back, one hip, two hips, my shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, even my hands. Mapping me out. It wasn’t until he pulled me closer to him that I remembered we weren’t alone in the house.